


nowhere left to run

by hockeydyke



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Autumn, Fluff and Humor, Grocery Shopping, Halloween Preparation, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, This is just a how to guide explaining how to make your captain angry, Wrestling (but it's not strictly platonic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 06:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16012616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hockeydyke/pseuds/hockeydyke
Summary: “I’m going to the gym,” Jack says, as if they didn’t already have team workout earlier this morning. “I’ll be back in two hours. If you’re not back with toilet paper by then, I’m getting Bitty to revoke your pie privileges.”“No,” Ransom says. “We’ll do it. Promise. Bro to bro, it’ll happen.”--Ransom and Holster + Special Baking Night + grumpy Jack = a very, very ill-advised grocery store trip





	nowhere left to run

**Author's Note:**

> T-minus two days until the Check, Please! book is released. If you haven't already, there's still time to pre-order. Also, Ngozi is on currently on her book tour, so check out her website to see if she's coming to a bookstore/event near you. I just saw her in DC and she was VERY funny. Truly a legend.
> 
> Anywhere, here's this bullshit, aka the closest thing to crack I've ever written.

Ransom and Holster are about an hour into Special Baking Night when Jack gets home from his evening class and immediately decides to throw a classic preseason Jack tantrum.

That is to say, he drops his backpack down with a _thud_ in the entryway, takes one look at the two of them, sprawled out on the green couch with their legs overlapping and an empty plate on the coffee table, and lets out an exasperated sigh.

“You know we have practice at eight tomorrow, right?” he asks. It seems like he is getting better at recognizing Special Baking Night as it’s occurring.

He used to be almost as bad as Bitty at recognizing it-- but not quite as bad. The first time Holster had told Bitty about the regular occasion, Bitty had made a sound not dissimilar to an excited puppy and asked what they were baking, to which Holster had answered, “The only thing baking is us.”

But that was last year, and this is now.

“Aye aye, Captain,” Holster says as well as he can with Ransom’s foot somewhat stuffed in the general vicinity of his face.

“Chyeah,” Ransom says, rolling onto his side, propping himself on one elbow, to face Jack. “We’ve got a smooth twelve hours to get this out of our system before then.”

“I hope so, for your sakes,” Jack says before he turns away from the living room doorway to storm upstairs, which is not really great because it suggests that tomorrow’s practice will be particularly awful.

The season home opener is two weeks away, and any hopes that Jack would mellow out for his senior year are already long gone. Last night he’d gone as far as to throw away the last two slices of a pie into the trash, which would have been a fineable offense for anyone other than Jack, who’d completed the sacrilegious action while staring Bitty down, unblinking. The moment passed when Shitty dropped a plate and shattered a plate in his horror, which had sent Bitty flinching and in turn jerked Jack out of his awful mood to ask Bitty if he was okay.

All this to say, Jack is pissy this time of year, so it’s truly no surprise when Ransom and Holster get less than five minutes of peace before they can hear rhythmic thumping of Jack plodding back down the steps two at a time.

Ransom tenses and makes a last-ditch effort to mentally prepare himself just as Jack appears in the doorway again. Holster, on the other hand, is preoccupied wondering if the crack in the ceiling above him has always been there.

“Did you two take my toilet paper?”

“You have-- toilet paper to take?” Ransom asks. “Was it, like, special toilet paper? When did you see it last?”

“There was a full package in the hall closet as of the beginning of the semester,” Jack says. “Where did it go?”

Ransom thinks about this very hard for a minute. He is reminded of last Sunday, which he and Holster spent teepeeing the lacrosse house in retaliation for them pointing a hose at the frogs when they came over for a movie night. But Jack couldn’t be mad at that, because that was justice.

“Stuff in the hall closet is definitely public property,” he says, finally.

Jack gives him a look that suggests closet stuff is not, in fact, free for public use. It’s the same look he gives the defensemen of opposing teams, pies taking up valuable counter space in the kitchen, and also his skates on days when they prove particularly hard to lace.

“I have about three sheets of toilet paper left on the roll in my bathroom,” Jack says.

“Have you considered maybe not shitting?” Ransom asks, because it seems like a fair request.

There’s a beat of silence, during which Ransom wonders if Jack could truly kill someone with his laser stare.

“I’m going to the gym,” Jack says, finally, as if they didn’t already have team workout earlier this morning. “I’ll be back in two hours. If you’re not back with toilet paper by then, I’m getting Bitty to revoke your pie privileges.”

“No,” Ransom says. “We’ll do it. Promise. Bro to bro, it’ll happen.”

Jack gives him a terse nod before he heads out the front door.

“Whose room is above here? Is that Bitty’s? Did he make that happen?” Holster asks, pointing at the ceiling crack. “He weighs, like, three pounds. How hard would he have to jump to make that?

“Bro. We have a mission and that mission is toilet paper.”

“Can we also get, like, tape? To fix that?”

Ransom _finally_ looks up to see what Holster’s been staring down. He squints at it for a second, which is funny because it’s Holster who has the bad eyesight, and then he frowns. “Yeah, I think we gotta. Toilet paper and duct tape it is, then. Let’s go.”

\\_._/

It takes them about half an hour to successfully pry themselves off the couch and locate two pairs of shoes, which is very important because no shoes, no shirt, no service, bros.

After that it’s a surprisingly easy journey to Murder Stop & Shop. They take the most direct route and get there in just under twenty minutes. They are, after all, men on a mission. That mission takes them through the automatic sliding doors of the store and straight to the display of potted plants at the front of the store.

They stare at the plants in silence for a minute or so. Thyme, mint, sage, parsley, basil-- there’s just so many to look at. Does Bitty need these for baking?

“Are these free samples?” Holster asks, reaching out to break a mint leaf off from the plant and pop it in his mouth. He chews thoughtfully for a moment, then swallows.

“Does your mouth taste funny?” Ransom asks.

“Well, now it does. Does yours?”

Ransom does his best to taste his own mouth. It isn’t perfectly sound scientific method, but moving his tongue around a bit seems to do the trick. He nods. “Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know what the taste reminds me of.”

“Do you want me to taste it to help you figure it out, bro?”

Ransom gives Holster a firm look. Are Holster’s eyes always that red? He looks so high. It’s hilarious. He’s going to tell Holster that in a minute. “No, dude. We can do that later. Right now it’d distract us from our mission.”

“Can I help you boys find anything?”

Both of them jump. A uniformed Stop & Shop worker has approached from behind without them noticing, somehow. She flashes them a bright customer service smile.

“Uh,” says Ransom.

Holster, thankfully, is quicker on his feet. “No, we’re just browsing,” he says. “We like to come here to look at the food.”

She nods slowly and backs away into the nearest aisle.

“Nice save, bro,” Ransom says, offering his fist for Holster to bump. “Okay. They set up grocery stores so that you gotta walk through all the extra stuff to get to necessities, because they want to trick us into buying shit we don’t need.”

“Right,” says Holster. He picks up the mint plant.

“So we gotta put our blinders on and walk fast,” Ransom says. “Ready?”

“Blinders. Walk fast. Got it. Are those Halloween Oreos?”

Ransom stops fast enough that his Sperrys squeak on the tiled floor. “Okay. Pick those up. We need those.”

Holster already has several packages piled in his arms. “Um. Should I get a cart?”

Ransom nods. “We’ll definitely need a cart. You go get one and I’ll keep going. We have a mission, bro.”

Holster nods and turns to head back to the entrance while Ransom heads down the closest aisle. It’s the one with the Oreo display on the endcaps, so he figures it must be good, and it is. By the time he emerges on the other side of the store, he has an armful of Halloween candy and three other Oreo flavors.

Ransom nearly drops everything when he sees the refrigerated goods displayed against the wall. “Dinosaur chicken,” he says, softly, reverently, as he walks up and picks up a 60-piece bag. It’s exactly what they need.

“Bro, think fast!” Holster says, just as a shopping cart rams into Ransom’s ass. It’s empty, but it hurts like a motherfucker.

“Hey, man! What the fuck?” Ransom asks, trying to arch his neck to turn his head enough to see if the cart left a mark on his shorts. They’re nice shorts. They didn’t deserve this.”

“Sorry, dude. It ran away from me. Are those dinosaurs?”

And with that, Ransom forgets about his shorts and deposits the bag of chicken into Holster’s arms while he drops everything else into the cart. “I think we got everything,” he says.

Holster shakes his head. “I need something to drink, bro. I think my throat is dry enough to break off and fall into my stomach.”

“That’s nasty. I think there’s more drinks over there,” Ransom says, pointing a few refrigerator doors down to the dairy section. “Hydration station.”

“Chyeah, that works,” Holster says, grabbing a half-gallon of strawberry milk and dropping it into the cart. “Good to go?”

“Definitely. How do we get out?”

Holster gives Ransom a sharp look. “Same way we came, bro. When’s the last time you came grocery shopping?” He punctuates this by taking the cart from Ransom and wheeling it back up an aisle toward the front of the store. Ransom has to hustle to keep up.

“Uh. It was a while ago,” Ransom says. “Usually I can just give Bitty a list of whatever I’ll need and he’ll grab it ‘cause he’s here all the time anyway. Is that shitty?”

Holster looks around. “Where?”

“No, bro, not that Shitty. I mean, is it shitty of me to make Bitty do my grocery shopping?”

Holster thinks about this for a moment, then shakes his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. You give him money so he’s not paying for your shit?”

Ransom is tempted by boxes of Jell-O in the aisle they’re walking through, but he resists and speeds up to catch up to Holster and the cart. “Yeah, and a couple extra dollars, too.”

“Then you’re good. Oh, shit. Shit.” Holster stops in his tracks. He’s reached the end of the aisle. “What’s that?”

Ransom closes the last few steps between them and rests one hand up on Holster’s shoulder while he looks around him. “Oh, bro. It’s nearly October. We need one.”

“One? No, bro. We need more than that. We could take all of them.”

“I don’t think all of them are gonna fit in our cart, bro. Let’s just take what we can fit.”

“Deal.”

\\_._/

And that’s how they end up leaving Stop & Shop twenty minutes later with three large pumpkins and assorted snacks in their cart.

“How long were we in there?” Holster asks, blinking as they step out from Stop & Shop and back into the outdoor world. The sun is low on the horizon and their shadows are long on the asphalt.

“I have no idea. Shit. Jack said he’d be two hours. What if he beat us there?”

“If he beat us there then we can’t go back. We gotta take this shit and run away.”

“Wait! Bro!” Ransom stops pushing the cart for a moment. It rolls a few inches until it hits the curb leading up to the sidewalk home and stops. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. “The Find My Friends app, dude. Remember when Shitty requested the location of everyone in the group chat?”

“Yeah?”

“Jack wouldn’t know how to turn location sharing off. Aha-- look!” Ransom holds his phone out  under Holster’s nose. “See?”

Holster squints for a moment before his eyes adjust to the closeness of the screen. “Oh, shit. He’s still at the gym. We’re safe for sure.”

“Damn straight we’re safe. Even if he left now we’d beat him.”

“So you’re saying we can take this at a leisurely stroll?”

“Mad leisurely, bro. We can take the triplets to see the scenic route back,” Ransom says, gesturing at the pumpkins. They look happy nestled in the cart together. He and Holster are good pumpkin parents.

“Let’s do it, then. Let’s go, girls,” Holster says to the pumpkins, giving the cart a shove.

\\_._/

They do beat Jack back to the Haus. In fact, they beat everyone home-- Holster references the group chat again when they make it in the door (which is a challenge, considering shopping carts aren’t usually made for moving up steps).

“Shitty’s in the arts building. Lardo doesn’t have her location on, but you gotta assume he’s with her,” he says, two fingers pinching the map to see a wider range. “Jack just left the gym. Bitty’s in the library. I think it’s just us here.”

“Swawesome,” Ransom says, pulling the cart into the living room. “So it’ll be a surprise for everyone when we’ve already spookified the house for Halloween.”

“We’re so ahead of the game. Lax house is gonna be so jealous,” Holster says, bending down to lift one of the pumpkins out and set it on the hardwood floor of the living room. “I’m doing this one first. Which one is it?”

Ransom also removes a pumpkin and drops it next to Holster’s. “Um, I think it’s DJ?”

“No, yours is DJ. I think I have Michelle.”

“I guess that leaves Stephanie for Jack to carve,” Ransom says, shrugging. “I hope he appreciates that we’re gifting him one of our very own daughters.”

“Oh, he will,” Holster says. “He’s gonna love this. Let’s find a knife and something to put pumpkin gunk on.”

Ransom stands and the whole room sways. Whoa. He stays still for a second until the moment passes and heads to the kitchen. Thank god Shitty still subscribes to a newspaper, because it means there are a couple sheets already in the recycling bin that he grabs, along with all the baking implements in the utensil drawer that look like they’d be good for pumpkin carving.

When he returns to the living room, Holster has already used his Haus keys to start punching through the top of his pumpkin. Ransom hands him a knife and he finishes the job, removing the top and plunging his hand into the goop with a wet _squelch._

“Fuck, it’s cold,” he says. He removes his hand, already shaking from the chill, and drops a handful of gunk onto the newspaper pile. “Do you think Bitty can use this to make pumpkin pie?”

“Yeah, we can save all of this for him,” Ransom says, reaching into the pumpkin to test what it feels like. It is, in fact, cold. Holster didn’t lie about that.

“Bro, stop fisting my pumpkin,” Holster says, swatting his arm away. Since he’s already off-balanced, Ransom falls onto his side, pulling the pumpkin down along with him.

“Hey!” he says, pulling out his hand and throwing pumpkin guts at Holster. They land on his t-shirt, and Ransom instantly regrets it, because he knows that retaliation will be swift.

“You asked for this,” Holster says, plunging his hand into the pumpkin. “I can’t believe I finally have an excuse to destroy those awful shorts.”

“No! Not the shorts-- anywhere else, bro!” Ransom says, but it’s too late because Holster is reeling his arm back to wind up for his throw and--

The front door slams again and they both freeze. The handful of pumpkin innards drops out of his hand to the hardwood, landing with a sickening _slop._

Jack’s arms are already crossed in disappointment. “I don’t even want to know what you’re doing--”

“--Carving pumpkins,” Holster says. “Duh. Stephanie is all yours.”

Jack shakes his head. “Don’t care. Just clean up when you’re done and make sure Bittle doesn’t know that you were using his bread knife to cut pumpkins. I’m just glad you guys actually went to the store.”

Ransom nods. “Yeah, of course we went to the store! We had a mission.”

Jack’s brow shoots up at that, but he chooses not to ask about it and instead nods. Then he turns and disappears up the stairway.

Ransom turns to face Holster. “I think we did it, bro. He’s not mad. Mission is officially accomplished.” He lifts his hand for a high five and Holster meets it with enthusiasm. It sends pumpkin seeds flying everywhere.

“Wanna take a break and let me taste your mouth now, bro?” Holster asks.

“I think it might be a good time for a break, yeah,” Ransom drops his carving knife and scoots closer to Holster. It’s probably a good idea if he lets Holster figure out this taste, after all. For science.

“RANSOM! HOLSTER!” Jack’s voice is loud enough for them to clearly hear from upstairs. “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!”

“Oh, shit,” says Ransom, taking hold of the front of Holster’s shirt. “What do you think he’s mad about?”

Holster’s already closing his eyes and leaning in. “Don’t worry about it. It’s probably not important.”

Ransom nods. That’s fair, because they have other things to worry about.

**Author's Note:**

> If you were to guess that the events of this fic are based off real life, then you maybe, possibly, might be right. B) 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr as @hockeydyke and on Twitter as @sydneykz12 and in person if you're the cute girl from the bookstore who I met at the book talk who I didn't give my number because you were working!
> 
> Finally, the title is from Thriller because I wanted something Halloween-themed.


End file.
